UAE. F5 Networks is set to loudly champion the Middle East’s potential for multi-cloud-driven digital transformation at GITEX 2018.

The cloud and application security expert will showcase a raft of news services, as well as present original research on how multi-cloud business and consumer realities will evolve over the next five years.

F5’s multi-cloud positioning comes at time of growing cloud receptivity in the region. Earlier this year, the company commissioned another research agency, Think Positive, to conduct one of the GCC’s most in-depth cloud-related study involving board-level decision-makers.

Almost all GCC businesses (99%) believed the cloud can have a positive impact on market share and help to displace competitors. 90% also stated that it can improve brand perception, and 89% praised its capacity to improve innovation. A clear consensus was also reached on the cloud’s potential to enhance the overall customer experience (90%).

F5’s new research aims to expand on these initial findings and map out the challenges and benefits of optimal multi-cloud deployment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

“The Middle East is in a fantastic, globally enviable position to harness the cloud in all its incarnations. Governments are already activating world-class plans to change the way people live and work, and there is a huge pool of tech-savvy youngsters set to enter the workforce. These are exciting, game-changing times. At GITEX 2018, we expect showcase our most compelling vision yet on how new digital realities will unfold in the region and, against this transformational backdrop, how to best deploy, secure and optimise applications in a multi-cloud context,” said Diego Arrabal, VP – Middle East, Turkey & Africa, F5 Networks.

New F5 products in the GITEX 2018 spotlight include:

- F5 Advanced WAF™ supports a variety of consumption and licensing models, including a per-app basis, as well as perpetual, subscription, and utility billing options for ultimate flexibility in the cloud and the data center. This helps SecOps better collaborate with modern DevOps and NetOps teams to easily deploy app protection services in any environment that can be configured for individual applications or en masse. F5’s holistic approach to application security reduces management complexity, decreases OpEx, and efficiently delivers services to neutralize attacks. Closely coinciding with the launch, F5 was named a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Web Application Firewalls Q2 2018 report (published in June).

- BIG-IP Cloud Edition™ is offered as a per-app virtual Application Delivery Controller (ADC) that can apply and automate policy-based services at each step in the development and production pipeline. This approach empowers app owners to better collaborate with NetOps, DevOps, and SecOps within an agile framework to significantly improve the performance, availability, and security of all applications. BIG-IP Cloud Edition combines F5’s broad portfolio of application services with the dramatically enhanced management, visibility, and analytics capabilities of BIG-IQ®. F5’s software-based solution lets customers easily add ‘right-sized’ services tailored for individual applications, multiple cloud environments, and user demands. As a prominent use case, the solution enables customers to deploy Advanced Web Application Firewall™ policies to address sophisticated application threats in a consistent way across public and private clouds.

- F5 SSL Orchestrator provides policy-based orchestration capabilities across the full security service chain for any network topology, device, or application. Orchestration on this level groups devices into services to intelligently decrypt and steer traffic, allowing for independent monitoring, load balancing, and scaling to adapt to changing network conditions and increasing traffic demands. This marks a vast improvement over the industry’s legacy security model, where piecemeal inspection devices perform decryption independently, frequently leaving gaps for attackers.

- F5 Access Manager protects sensitive data with a Zero Trust model while providing access for authorized users, devices, and APIs, guarding against pervasive threats such as man-in-the-middle attacks. Product features enable organizations to think outside of traditional security boundaries, empowering them to unlock additional business models and operational efficiencies without compromising protections around apps, users, and data.

- F5’s new VNF Manager simplifies consumption of F5’s leading portfolio of VNFs (based on BIG-IP capabilities) that are provisioned in service providers’ software-defined networking environments. With F5, organizations can take advantage of the complete lifecycle management of VNF services, unlocking essential scale and automation for newly virtualized networks without burdensome complexity. This approach is an ideal fit for mobile operators and service providers looking to software-based infrastructures as part of their network evolution. F5 also supports customers’ existing orchestration solutions for streamlined integration via open and extensible APIs.